It seems the KMT has seen the writing on the wall, or at least the latest polling where they are getting absolutely dominated by the DPP in head-to-head matchups, and is realizing that making it rain pig entrails in the Legislative Yuan and screaming about how President Tsai Ph.D. is forged haven’t helped their poll numbers that are taking a long walk off a short pier. So they’ve done what any person that is desperately clinging on to relevance does. They’re gonna hustle NFTs!
Today (25th) the KMT held a meeting to discuss the future of the party and how to get all those kids back in the party. They held a conference related to The Future of Taiwan’s Metaverse (台灣元宇宙的未來I—素還真與書畫家的相遇). The ostensible purpose of this event was to promote traditional culture, apparently through NFTs, which we all know are the best way to preserve and encourage traditional culture. To maintain culture you most monetize it, the culture is even more preserved if the servers run on fossil fuels I’m told.
It seems likely that the real purpose of this event is simply to remain relevant. Though the KMT has issues with this being that their popularity has been continuously dropping, recently even falling below the TPP‘s numbers in national polling. The KMT is also a party that is rapidly aging. As voters fall to other parties, or pass away, the party must find ways of bringing in the youth.
One way they have tried to do this before is by putting out videos of members dancing or singing. This has not worked well as the KMT largely devoid of rhythm or pitch. So it appears that they have landed on NFTs, which require no talent, outside of conscripting an artist to give them their work to sell. This should be easy enough as the KMT still does have a generous amount of money from their exploits running Taiwan under martial law and through the fact that they are largely the party of big business, making money through exploitation of labor, especially in places like China.
However, they may have not calculated that even if people purchase their NFTs, which there is no guarantee of that, it certainly doesn’t mean that they would be daft enough to vote for them. Though perhaps they will be content with just making money off of people that desire to own a jpeg of Eric Chu doing the macarena or whatever the KMT’s NFT’s end up being.
While this scheme is unlikely to bring fresh blood into the party it is possible that the KMT could get some money out of the situation, but its unlikely to be an amount that actually moves the needle on their electoral future. We’ll see how deep the KMT gets into the NFT game, and it will be interesting to see what their next desperate stab at remaining relevant is, perhaps taking up smoking or buying sports cars. Either way it will be a spectacle to watch the party struggle through its midlife crisis.